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A Weekend of Silence Is the Ultimate Spa Amenity

Quiet time has made the leap from preschool to the world of high-end wellness.

By
Katie Becker

Oct 24, 2017

Getty Images

To get to Eremito, a remote boutique hotel in the hills of Umbria, you take a jeep a couple of miles up a bumpy dirt road. It will likely be the loudest thing you hear for days. Nestled within a 7,400-acre nature reserve, the monastery replica has no TVs, no WiFi, and no cell service. Visitors’ days are occupied with steam baths, the hot tub, organic vegetarian meals from the gardens, and what is quickly becoming one of the hottest amenities one can buy today: silence.

The Silent Spa at Therme Laa, in Austria.

Courtesy Therme Laa.

Luxury hotels, spas, and other sanctuaries on both sides of the pond are making silence—which in the recent past could be found only at strict, crunchy retreats in California or upstate New York, or during modest dinners at Baja’s Rancho La Puerta—one of their top commodities. The sprawling new Therme Laa Silent Spa, which opened late last year north of Vienna, generates no more sound than what comes from its three-story waterfall.

There is a major trend toward people feeling they need to rest their minds.

Guests at the Alpina Gstaad can now nab a badge that denotes please-don’t-talk-to-me status throughout the five-star hotel. And at Villa Stéphanie in Baden-Baden, the rooms literally come equipped with a digital kill switch that shuts off the WiFi and electricity and blocks cell phone service thanks to copper plates installed in the walls.

“The word we use is stillness,” says Jeremy McCarthy, spa director for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, who has instituted an annual Silent Night across Mandarin Oriental’s properties, offering music- and conversation-free treatments. “There is a major trend toward people feeling they need to rest their minds.”

A sensory deprivation treatment at Miraval, in Tucson.

Courtesy Miraval, Tucson.

At Miraval in Tucson, it’s not just acoustics that are being eliminated. During the resort’s new Vasudhara treatment, guests receive a floating Thai massage while blindfolded so that they can find “true peace in the darkness.”

Not only are we hungry for peace and quiet—consider the urgent news alerts of the past 12 months and the fact that the iPhone recently celebrated its 10th birthday—the reality is we will probably get it only if we pay for it. Lodro Rinzler, Buddhist author and co-founder of New York’s MNDFL meditation studio, says his business has tripled in the two years since its first location opened. “I feel as if we are entering a post-tech era, with digital detox camps for adults and digital sabbaths from electronics,” he says. "People realize it’s an addiction."

And it’s more than just the toll that noise and smartphones take. (A study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research found that the farther a phone was from a participant—on the desk, in a bag, in another room—the better he or she scored on tests in such subjects as information retention.) Silence itself has been proven to have benefits. A study at Duke University on mice found that two hours of silence every day triggered brain cell development, and a study in the journal Heart found that silence had a more calming effect on breathing and blood pressure than even soothing music.

“People think of their time at the spa as a fountain of youth to look younger, but really one of the biggest benefits is on the mind,” McCarthy says. “When I spend that hour on a massage table in silence, I get ideas. By the end I need to run to a pen and pad of paper, because the ideas start percolating. My mind needed the moment to be still.” Turns out the silent treatment can be a good thing.

This story appears in the November 2017 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Now

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